HDD

Working in data recovery business for years, we are used to seeing emails such as this one:

“My computer went wonky, so I decided to reinstall Windows. To make sure all the glitches are gone, I chose to reinstall from scratch on a new partition. After I installed Windows on my computer, all of my files are gone. I know that you guys have a bunch of data recovery tools. Is there a particular tool to help me recover my files? I tried your Hetman Uneraser, but it didn’t find anything. Help?”

Hybrid hard drives, or SSHD (Solid-State Hybrid Drives) are still specialty items, but they are slowly gaining popularity. Combining sheer storage capacity of traditional magnetic hard drives with extremely high access speed solid-state drives are known for, hybrid hard drives promise to offer the best of the two worlds. At least in theory.

Now when we covered most of the theory, we can proceed to actually recovering files. As you may remember from our previous article, FAT was never designed with data recovery in mind. As a result, FAT was very inconvenient to work with when it came to recovering lost information.

In our previous article we were discussing how data recovery tools are able to recover information. In that article we covered FAT, one of the two major file systems used in Windows computers. Today, we’ll be discussing the other file system: the NTFS. The authors of this article used their experience by developing Hetman Partition Recovery, a universal data recovery tool working with both FAT and NTFS formatted devices.

Data recovery software has come a long way since the “unerase” tool was introduced in Norton Utilities 1.0 in 1982. A few years later, Microsoft added “undelete.exe” was added to MS DOS 5. Both tools relied on the properties of the file system (FAT16 at the time) to retain information about deleted files in its directory structures.

You’ve shot hundreds or thousands of pictures. Now what? You’ll probably want to get them organized, and will most probably want to share some of them with others. Depending on your goals, you may want to look for the right solution among the two big categories.